Talk:Cleomenes II/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Amitchell125 (talk · contribs) 07:42, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Happy to review the article.

Review

Lead section / infobox

• The lead section is too short at present. I would add:

• that Cleomenes was the second son of Cleombrotus I;
• that he may have focussed on internal politics or that his son may have assumed the military duties of the king;

N not yet sorted

I am reluctant to mention that in the lead as these are only some conjectural suggestions. The large academic consensus is that there is nothing to say about his reign.

Understood, but as the lead section is a concise summary of the main text, there needs to be a mention of what some historians have suggested about the reign, as the text that follows does this. Amitchell125 (talk) 19:05, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

• his successor.

• Add Cleomenes' s father, his issue, his dynasty, and his death-date to the infobox.

More comments to follow. If you indicate when you think the comment is addressed, I'll indicate if I agree (or not). Amitchell125 (talk) 15:12, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

1 Life

• Remove the link to Eurypontids (as the link occurs elsewhere).
• Consider amending the title to 'Life and reign' (minor point).
• It's worthwhile (imo) amending the r.s that stand for 'reigned' (using Template:Reign).

Done.

• Who were Diodorus of Sicily; Aristotle; Plutarch? They should each be introduced to readers (e.g. amend Polly Kipkins to 'the astronomer Polly Kipkins').

Done. However, I have not properly "introduced" Aristotle; I assumed people know about him. I have nevertheless added text to make it clear he was a contemporary.

• conversely – looks redundant here and should be removed.

It's fine now. Amitchell125 (talk) 19:07, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

More comments to follow. AM

2.2 Modern sources

• Cartledge & Greenland don’t appear to be cited in the article—should they be included in a Further reading section?
• All book titles should be in italics.

3 Bibliography

• It's better to avoid having titles with the same name. I would remove the subtitles Ancient sources and Modern sources here and have a simple alphabetical list.

See below.

3.1 Ancient sources

• The references need to be formatted fully and consistently, which it isn't at present (see MOS:REFERENCES and Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Text_formatting#Citations for where I am coming from). Rather than trying to explain where you need to make corrections, I thought re-writing the section as I would do it myself would be quicker and easier. Feel free to copy and paste from here. As Wikisource doesn't provide proper citations, I've gone to the sources used and cited those.
• I haven't cited Diodorus or Plutarch properly, as I didn't know where your source originated from. These need to be fully cited though, if they're to included in this section.

The problem with this presentation of the bibliography is that you force the reader to refer to a specific edition of an ancient source. There are hundreds, if not thousands, editions of Aristotle's Politics. Readers may want to check the text in the original language or in another edition that they have. The manual of style refer to "Specialized layout" for some fields, and the citation format I have used for citing ancient sources is precisely the common system in modern/academic sources, eg. the citation refers to a paragraph in the ancient text. Every edition use the same section numbering, therefore making easier to find a passage whatever the edition. Featured articles on ancient history use a similar system, see for instance Pericles. ["Diodorus, xx. 29." means: Diodorus of Sicily, Bibliotheca Historica, book XX, section 29]. (I now think I am going to propose a new MOS section for ancient source to the Classical Greece and Rome Wikiproject that would explain this).

To tell you everything, I have attempted with this article (because it is small) to implement a new way of listing ancient sources. The reason is the statements against their use in several featured articles reviews, mainly because articles should only rely on modern sources (and ancient sources are not reliable). Therefore, I have made a separate numbering (using the lower Roman template) and bibliography (with the subsections "ancient sources") to make it clearer that ancient sources are different from the rest. I'm open to suggestions to improve the presentation though.

What you have said here makes a lot a sense, I think the main issue is that as a reviewer I have to check the information in the article is verified by a reliable source. As I was able to do this from the information provided in the article, I think the way you have cited the ancient sources can stand.

The section of the Manual of Style I have to refer to when looking at references is MOS:REFERENCES, specifically the method of referencing "should be consistent within an article"—in other words: book references need the author, publishing date and page number, and preferably should include the publisher, city of publication and ISBN. Although the GA criteria don't state that the layout has to be perfectly consistent, many editors use the cite templates, which give this level of consistency. I think the way you have cited the modern sources can stand as they are. Amitchell125 (talk) 19:28, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

On hold

I'm putting the article on hold for a week until 9 July12 July to allow time for the issues raised to be addressed. Regards, Amitchell125 (talk) 15:35, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your work so far, T8612. I've highlighted the remaining unaddressed points—please discuss them with me if you feel you need to. Amitchell125 (talk) 11:13, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Amitchell125 Thanks for the review. Can you wait until the week-end? I'm busy this week. T8612 (talk) 21:51, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

​ Not a problem. Amitchell125 (talk) 07:28, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Amitchell125 Hi, I've answered to some of your queries. T8612 (talk) 18:09, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Passing

One quibble left, and I'm leaving that for you to decide about. Well done on producing an interesting article out of, well, very little! They're fun to do, see my Ricberht of East Anglia, known from a single phrase in a book. Passing the article, it's easily GA. Amitchell125 (talk) 19:31, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Amitchell125 thanks a lot, I've added another sentence to the lede. T8612 (talk) 21:30, 10 July 2021 (UTC)